Lincoln Summer Scientist Week 2025 took place in the first week of August this year and Dr Kirsten Williams (Leverhulme Trust funded Post-doc researcher), myself and student intern helpers ran our eye tracking games at the event as part of the Sticky Eyes research project.
The Eyelink 1000 eye tracker was used to play a version of our “busy bee” game in which a “remote distractor” (a flower) appeared as children tracked a cartoon bee with their eyes. This game will help us “map” the extent of the sticky fixation effect in children in order to see if younger children are more strongly affected by distractors in their central vision.
Kirsten also ran an “Eye Spy” demonstration activity in the “fun zone”. We showed children the mobile Tobii glasses 2 eye tracker and video spy glasses and were able to see where children as young as 6 were looking during table top shape sorting puzzle tasks. This was interesting for the children and gave us valuable practical experience in preparation for the classroom studies we plan to run as part of the wider project.
We’d like to thank all the children, parents and guardians for taking part in this years Summer Scientist Week. Watch this space for more opportunities to take part and learn about more research.
Our paper on eye movements in children with sensory processing difficulties (SPD) has been published in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy!
We used computerised eye tracking tasks to see how eye movements differ in children with and without SPD (see previous post on background to the research). We found that children with SPD showed differences in eye movements tests compared to other children without SPD. Interestingly, it didn’t seem to make a difference what diagnosis children had (e.g. Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia etc.), those with SPD all showed similar problems with the eye movement tasks.
Children with SPD showed more errors in the Anti saccade task, but not the Pro saccade task
The findings lend some support to the idea that SPD might be a separate condition, or an independent “dimension” of common neurodevelopment disorders. The study also suggests that eye tracking might be useful in the future for assessing children’s sensorimotor function and for evaluating outcomes of occupational therapy.
See here for the full text of the paper. Please also get in touch if you have any questions about the research, whether you are a parent, therapist or have oculomotor / sensory processing issues yourself.
The Leverhulme Trust has awarded the University of Lincoln a 3 year £230K grant to support our research into the development of children’s eye movement and fixation control. I will be leading an interdisciplinary project team including Charlotte Cartledge (Psychology), Rachel Sharpe (Education) and Frouke Hermens (Open University NL) with Julia Foecker (Psychology) and James Siddle (Lincolnshire Research School) as project advisors.
Parents know that young children are not very good at finding things (e.g. a lost toy or odd sock) often failing to spot objects that are in plain sight. Our eye tracking research studies at Lincoln Summer Scientist Week have highlighted an aspect of children’s oculomotor control that might explain why this is. We find that children are are often slow to “disengage” eye fixation from the object they are currently looking at in order to move their eyes to look at something else. In our “follow busy bee” eye tracking “game”, children have to follow a cartoon bee as it jumps around a computer screen. Normally they find this quite easy, but when another object appears at the centre of the screen and the bee is somewhere else, they often miss the bee and stay looking straight ahead. The graph below shows how these instances of the eyes getting “stuck” decrease with age. We call this “sticky fixation” and the project will investigate why it occurs and how it affects children’s visual abilities. The research will include eye tracking studies of visual search and reading, a real world study of how children use eye movements in a school classroom and laboratory based brain activity monitoring studies of fixation control.
The funding will directly support a full-time post-doctoral researcher as well as a temporary lecturer in cognitive and developmental psychology.
Over the last few years we have been collaborating with local occupational therapist Annabelle Hippisley using the Eyelink 1000 eye tracker to examine eye movement control in some of the children she sees in her practice.
A Sensory Integration Therapy session
Therapeutic approaches in occupational therapy are strongly influenced by the work of American psychologist Jean Ayres, who suggested that difficulties experienced by children in conditions such as Autism are due to problems integrating sensory information. This inspired a therapeutic approach which emphasises developing sensorimotor coordination via playful activities such as ball catching, swings and obstacle courses.
Despite its influence in practice, Ayres ideas have received little attention from university academic researchers. As a step towards addressing this, some of Annabelle’s clients have been taking part in research using our Eyelink eye tracker to play eye movement “games” which measure the speed and accuracy of different types of movement, including saccades (rapid eye movements used to shift the eyes from one object to another), smooth pursuit (keeping eyes fixed on moving object) and sustained fixation (keeping eyes stationary).
A research paper reporting the detailed findings of the research is currently under review, but in the meantime we would like to say thank you to all the children and parents who took part and watch this space for more details on the findings and implications of the research!
This month we published a paper in the International Journal of Language and CommunicationDisorders entitled “Gaze-speech coordination during social interaction in Parkinson’s disease“. The research used mobile eye tracking to examine how people with and without Parkinsons use eye movements during spoken conversation. In order to get people talking we asked them to play a card guessing game, based on the children’s guessing game “HedBanz” in which one player has to describe an object written on a card and the other player has to guess. A link to the full open access publication is available here.
Previous research has shown that eye movements are important in signalling “turn taking” in conversation, whereby the speaker indicates to their conversation partner that the end of the speech turn is coming. Although you might not be aware that you are doing it, we often direct our eye gaze towards the other persons face to indicate it is their turn to speak next. Other work by myself and others has shown how the voluntary control of eye movements is affected in Parkinsons disease. Taking these findings together, we wondered if there were differences in how patients used their eyes during speech and conversation.
The results showed that people with Parkinsons tend to make longer duration periods of eye fixation on the other persons face and elsewhere. They did less well when describing cards to the other player, suggesting problems with speech, but guessed just as many objects when listening to someone else describing, suggesting that their condition didn’t affect their ability to understand others. We also found that the timing of speech turns was subtly different when a patient was playing the game, with a tendency towards shorter gaps and more interruptions in speech, indicating people with Parkinsons may be slightly more impulsive and sometimes “jump in” to interrupt others more.
The results confirm something I have personally noticed about people with Parkinsons over the years: That they sometimes have a subtly different pattern of gaze during conversation including extended periods of eye contact. This can be slightly disconcerting if you are not aware of it and together with phenomena like reduced facial expression might adversely affect social interaction and communication. We think that wider public knowledge and awareness of some of these more subtle features of the condition could itself improve the quality of life and social connectedness of people with Parkinsons.
The research was conducted in collaboration with Gemma Ezard (Lincolnshire NHS) and Frouke Hermans (formerly University of Lincoln now at the Open University in the Netherlands) and was funded by BA/Leverhulme small grant Ref: SG152231
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